Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat [LWN.net]

Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Posted Feb 12, 2015 16:15 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (guest, #5198)
In reply to: Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat by pizza
Parent article: Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

> Yes, group chats were added later. And I suggest you blame said clients for their poor support; many others have no problems whatsoever.

I think that any time you see poor support of a protocol across multiple clients like this you have to apply a simple razor when assigning blame, either all the developers of all the clients are unusually stupid or the protocol is unusually difficult to implement. Which do you really think is the more likely explanation?

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Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Posted Feb 12, 2015 18:32 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> I think that any time you see poor support of a protocol across multiple clients like this you have to apply a simple razor when assigning blame, either all the developers of all the clients are unusually stupid or the protocol is unusually difficult to implement. Which do you really think is the more likely explanation?

...or, perhaps, both are true? In the case of XMPP, the specs are undeniably complex, but at the same time, so is the problem space it's trying to address.

What I've personally found disappointing is the lack of collaboration among the various client (and server) developers -- Every implementation seems to use a different language. But then there's the Android situation where you have half a dozen forks of the same underlying library, and *still* nobody's sharing. That's not a spec problem.